Sharing Circles, Visual Storywork, and the Vision Wheel: Collective Indigenous Methods for Research in Healthcare Environments and Learnings from Traditional Healing Spaces at CAMH

Indigenous peoples in Canada continue to experience mental health inequities shaped by colonization, and hospitals are increasingly creating Traditional Healing Spaces (THS) in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #22. How such spaces should be studied, using methods epistemologically consistent with the healing they support, remains underexamined. A virtual Sharing Circle was held in March 2022 with seven Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest mental health hospital, each of whom had previously been interviewed individually about the hospital’s three THS. A Two-Spirit Indigenous artist attended as a witness and produced five works of visual storywork in real time. Transcript and images were analyzed together through the Vision Wheel, a framework adapted from Medicine Wheel teachings, under the governance of an Indigenous Research Circle. The circle generated collective knowledge that individual interviews had not reached: spiritual safety as a distinct dimension of culturally safe care; invitation and responsibility as a differentiated ethics of allyship; barriers as embodied colonial wounds and institutional accountability failures; and the Red Door, a visible designated Indigenous entrance built collectively across participants. Sharing Circle methodology, Vision Wheel analysis, and visual storywork can be combined within institutional healthcare settings to generate collective, relational knowledge.